Mammals

The world diversity of mammals are found in the Andes and eastern Africa at the landscape scale. Sit tight because in the Amazon Rainforest of Ecuador, there is a unique place that holds about 30% of the mammalian diversity of the entire Amazon Basin. It’s the world known Yasuni Biosphere Reserve (Yasuni National Park & Waorani Ethnic Reserve), it’s located between the mighty Napo River and the Curaray River. Yasuní Biosphere Reserve location nurtures this abundance. The reserve sits at the intersection of the Andes, the Equator, and the Amazon region, an ecological bull’s-eye where extremely rich communities of plants, amphibians, birds, and mammals in South America converge. We invite you watch YASUNI WILDERNESS: MAMMALS, a compilation of exotics videos and photos, with a handful of the bush dogs, tapirs, jaguars, pumas ocelots, anteaters, monkey, armadillos and others. Most of them were captured with trap cameras, showing a high density in peccaries, tapirs, jaguars, pumas and ocelots.

The Yasuní Biosphere Reserve, appear to be globally unique in their ability to support at least 200 coexisting mammal species, the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve mammal list contains 204 species,it represents approximately one-third of all Amazonian mammals and 44% of all mammals known from Ecuador (382 sp).

Considering that Ecuador has the world’s ninth highest mammal diversity, finding nearly half of the country’s mammals in a single park is remarkable. The number of coexisting mammal species in the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve is also extraordinary. Twelve primate species approaches the richest known sites in the Neotropics (14 eastern Peru and western Brazilian).

Yasuní’s primate richness represents only one major primate radiation while those in west Africa and southeast Asia represent three different primate radiations. The Yasuní Biosphere Reserve has amongst the highest local bat richness for any site in the world . Whereas 117 bat species are estimated to occur on a regional scale within the Amazon Basin, Yasuní is projected to harbor comparable richness on just a local scale.

The Yasuní Biosphere Reserve also shelters more than 20 globally threatened mammal species, including the yellow-bellied spider monkey and the rare golden-mantled tamarin.